2 Digital Ways to Increase Productivity of Transport Operations

Is your company finding it difficult to increase productivity of your transport assets? If so, you might find this brief post of value. I thought I’d share a couple of ways in which a little IT investment might just help you to make inroads into better fleet utilisation and productivity.

Stop With the Manual Resource Planning

This first tip for improving productivity of transport assets takes on greater importance if your company runs a route-trade operation or operates a very large truck fleet. Trust me when I say that investment in route planning/optimisation software will pay off big time in terms of productivity.

If you’re still using a paper-based method for route planning or managing with rudimentary planning software, you’re leaving money on the table.

Thanks to advanced algorithmic calculations, today’s routing and scheduling applications (if well-implemented) can pull together a large number of orders and plan them onto optimized routes which will save time and fuel and improve vehicle utilization.

With such an application, not only can you improve productivity of transport assets and drivers, but you’ll get more from your transport administration and management team. Dynamic route optimization software can plan the work for an entire fleet in minutes—a task which can otherwise be a day’s worth of manual work in some operations.

Stop With the Paperwork Too

Are your drivers still setting off each day with a clipboard full of POD (proof of delivery) documents and other documents?

Once you see the different when an electronic POD solution is implemented, you’ll wonder why you held on to paper-based processes for so long.

Imagine; no more lost delivery notes or unintelligible writing to interpret. Drivers no longer have to wrestle with soggy sheets of paper in the rain and customers can check deliveries and sign them off in moments.

You’d be surprised how much time per day can be saved by providing your fleet with a mobility solution. You also benefit from near real-time data input, so your team can respond much faster when issues arise on the road. With less time spent on managing paperwork, you can increase productivity of transport assets and the back office staff that support them.

Trust in Tech to Increase Transportation Productivity

As I’ve said before, software and systems aren’t the be all and end all in making supply chain productivity improvements. There are fundamental things such as good management, employee engagement, and process improvement to consider too.

However there are some areas in which today’s technology excels, one of which is transportation. If your company wants to invest in digital solutions that make a difference, it’s worth evaluating how they can impact productivity of transport operations.